The Black Watch

Victor McLaglen stars as Captain Donald King, a member of a Scots regiment of His Majesty's Armed Forces during WW1. While his company receives orders to ship out to the front, King is given a different assignment, He is to go undercover to India, where he will pretend to be a drunk who gets chased out of the service so that he can infiltrate a gang of Muslim rebels who worship a woman named Yasmani (Myrna Loy) as a goddess. Naturally things get further complicated when King falls for Yasmani. Also featuring Randolph Scott and John Wayne as extras.

This was director Ford's first sound movie, and it shows. For the first 45 minutes or so, I was prepared to call this one a complete turkey, just horrible in nearly every way, but by the end I thought pretty much the same thing, except it plunged into pure camp, and Ford manages to shoot some visually interesting shots when the action moves to "The Cave of the Echoes". McLaglen and Loy are awful, and you would never know from this that either would be capable of acting their way out of a paper bag.

Ford certainly hadn't grasped sound acting, and virtually everyone is terrible, drawing lines out to ludicrous length and over emoting like the worst silent film ham. Loy looks great, and she has a lengthy scene in a white, virtually see-through shirt. I was left wondering what kind of East Indian Muslims also worshiped random white ladies as goddesses, but that train of thought led nowhere. The fiery, shadowy Cave interiors are atmospheric, and the scene where McLaglen is "forced" to wrestle the Muslim champion is amusing, as I would think it was harder to stop Victor McLaglen from wrestling random guys on the set every day. 5/10 on its merit as a dramatic film, 7/10 on a so good it's bad scale, I split the difference.

Is it because it's the beginning of the talkies that both McLaglen's and Myrna Loy's playing are almost ridiculous ?One should forgive the actress for her part of an Indian Joan Of Ark -but a maid who is fond of men,we are told- is not exactly what you call the part of her life.All that takes place in a pasteboard India looks like a poor man's "lifes of a Bengal Lancer"(which would appear six years later):even two names (Mohammed Khan and McGregor) are used in both movies.

On the other hand ,all that takes place in Scotland shows John Ford's touch :the manly camaraderie, the brothers in arm singing "Auld Lang Syne" before leaving for France (WW1),the officer wrongly accused of cowardice -his superior warns him:"you will be a pariah"-;and more prosaically ,the missus ' piece of advice to the private about his privates and the soldier confessing later that at least at war he was left alone.

The scene of the crystal ball almost predates the one in Mankiewicz's "Cleopatra" when Julius Cesar is murdered.

This might have fared better with a stronger leading character because, for my money, getting Victor McLaglen to play a captain in the Royal Scots engaging in some tribal Indian subterfuge was just a mission too far! Anyway, he is "King" who just as his regiment is heading for France is re-routed to the Northwest Territories of India on a top secret mission. His erstwhile colleagues view this as akin to desertion, but we know that his task to discover and destroy a massive arms dump that could spell doom and destruction for the Raj and rescue some hostages is something that this locally born man is best suited to do. Pretty effortlessly this six-foot gent finds and infiltrates the tribe and thanks to the sponsorship of it's high priestess "Yasmani" (Myrna Loy) manages to formulate a plan to thwart the cunning antics of the would-be revolutionaries. The last ten minutes or so bring the story alive and allow the engaging McLaglen to show us a little of the glint in his eye, but the rest of this is a remarkably stage-bound exercise that rarely ventures outdoors and rather than steeping us in end-to-end action, rather drowns us in end-to-end dialogue. Loy looks every inch the star, but more of the silent movies than a talkie as her poise is perfect but her pitch "will you obey my commands?" much less so. Inadvertently, perhaps, the conclusion also reminds us just how the tiny contingent of British soldiers did manage to subdue a population hundreds of times their number and of course there isn't a great deal of jeopardy as the story takes a bit too long to reach it's predictable end. I do like the genre, but this is just a bit too static an interpretation of derring-do to stick in the mind for long with some of the editing looking like it was done on a rollercoaster.

Released in 1929, THE BLACK WATCH is an entertaining flick shot in black & white, and John Ford's first all-talkie film. It's based on the 1916 novel 'King of the Khyber Rifles' by Talbot Mundy.

Captain Donald King (McLaglen) goes undercover and leaves his regiment (Black Watch) to put down a rebellion in India at the at the start of WWI. There he finds the beautiful princess Yasmani (Loy) who plans to send her minions to attack British forces at the Khyber Pass.

As we would expect from a Ford movie it has a good look, especially the outdoor scenes. The Cave of Echoes scenes are well crafted with fine visuals and sound effects.

The problem the movie has is it's dialogue in many scenes, Myrna Loy's in particular, is stilted and stagy , as if they thought the mics couldn't keep up with their voices. Still, a good movie.

John Ford is in my opinion the greatest director that ever lived, and he rarely ever made a misstep. Many people have listed The Black Watch as a misstep, but in context I do not think that it is. It is true that it is dated in the way that the dialogue is spoken, but find me one sound picture from 1929 that is not.

The problem was with sound pictures themselves, the movies had developed into near perfection in 1927-1928. But then sound became all the rage, and it wasn't profitable anymore for the studios to invest in silent movies. So the masterpieces of the late silent era were put on the back burner for stagy dramas with too much dialog or musicals even more stagy than the dramas.

The Black Watch has Ford's German expressionism influenced photography that he started in the late twenties after meeting F.W. Murnau. It also has the Ford themes of Integration into a society, self sacrifice, and the bond between men.

The one major drawback is the extremely stilted dialogue. No one really understood at the time how sound should be recorded live, which led to really irregular ways of saying lines. With long pauses between each others lines, since they did not want to step on each others' lines, so as to overwork the early microphones.

Victor McLaughlin's acting wasn't his best, but he was much better than Myrna Loy who honestly seemed as though she had been hypnotized before going on the set. I thought the guy who asked forforgiveness for his violence towards his fellow man, who would then do something violent was funny.

Compared to all of John Ford's other films this is near the bottom, but compared to everything else made in sound in 1929 this is at the top of the heap.